I'm abandoning my tentative plans to switch to to Lightroom for now. I was dreading the time it would take to manage the transition anyway.
The Geotagging features look great. I also plan on using the video integration for 7D output.
I was planning on stopping in the Apple store on the way home tonight anyway. It looks like I may be able to pick up a Aperture update along side my OS 10.6 update.

According to some folks at macrumors.com who have been to the Apple Store and asked, physical copies of Aperture will not be on the shelves until tomorrow. It looks like I'll need to endure a 500+ Meg download tonight. Remember the days when DSL seemed fast enough?

Its about time Canon sRAW and mRAW were supported.Users of the popular Panasonic G1 will also be happy.

Long overdue. The S90 is one of the most popular consumer digicams with RAW format, and has been shipping since October. The Lumix line has been a big hit for its form factor. This is the kind of delay that has lost Apple customers in droves. Even Aperture evangelists like Derrick Story had to ditch at least temporarily while waiting for the updates. With the life cycle of cameras growing ever shorter, not supporting them out of the gates is a terrible business strategy. Apple needs to pick up speed on this front, or outsource it.

Actually, one of my hopes for Aperture 3 was that they would open up the RAW processing pipeline to third parties, so that Canon, Panasonic, et. al. could incorporate their own algorithms into the app. A pipe dream to be sure, especially for a company like Apple, but I think it would offer a much better plugin architecture than either Apple or Adobe are offering now. Forcing plug-in developers to take over image processing after the RAW is rendered to pixels strikes me as utterly pointless. It's far better to use the Photoshop versions of those plugins with smart filters.

Maybe one of the most important features for file movement etc is this:Import XMP Sidecar DataWhile importing images, Aperture now imports metadata from XMP sidecar files located with them.

Yes, this is definitely welcome. It's ridiculous they didn't offer it before. There was no migration path to Aperture without it. How would anyone possibly switch?

Unfortunately, the XMP import is incomplete. It does not support star or color ratings from Adobe, which is just a ridiculous oversight. Again, not playing for interoperability in classic Apple tradition. A big mistake in my view. iView/Expression Media can see star rankings assigned in Bridge or Lightroom for example. By the way, this applies to JPEGs in addition to RAW which is just incredibly dumb.

I am going to have to do some testing to see if Aperture can sync XMP (as opposed to just reading and exporting). I will never again use a product that keeps library data hostage.

Eric, I looked into this briefly. There is an option to export metadata, but it only generates a .txt file. There is however an option to export masters with XMP sidecar. I think this options are the same as in v2?

As far as syncing - I haven't come across anything yet that gives me hope this was included.

Unfortunately, the XMP import is incomplete. It does not support star or color ratings from Adobe, which is just a ridiculous oversight. Again, not playing for interoperability in classic Apple tradition. A big mistake in my view.

Too bad. I wouldn't want to write IPTC to the master, and exporting XMP alongside masters has been there for a long time -- seems unchanged from earlier versions.

I have over 100,000 images in a folder structure, and would love for Aperture to sync out XMP alongside existing referenced masters. I think I'm going to have to export all masters into 1 directory with XMPs and write a program to copy them to where they actually live in my Pictures folder (I'm still looking for ways to get my metadata out of Aperture and into Lightroom).

I'm hopeful that Aperture 3 will fulfill my needs for a while. As long as it's fast and stable, everything else is secondary for me. I do not want to continuously change programs, just want to settle in and have something that works.
Nice features that I think will incorporate into my workflow are the synchronous backup to a second drive on import. geotagging, easier transfer of libraries from laptop to desktop and more non-destructive editing / brushes. After selects are complete etc, any special images for printing I will reexport the masters for Nikon RAW conversion and NX2 manipulation and or Photoshop, then resave back to Aperture as TIFFS in the original stack.

Reading through the features; I've looked at the Faces and Places feature. I know it's been on iPhoto for a while as has geotagging in general, and I've just assumed it was kind of hokey.But taking a look at it, have to admit it's pretty cool with very slick interface for geotagging integration with great applications for what we do as underwater photographers traveling the world. Faces on the other hand may not be so much part of my workflow, unless it can recognize fish. Now auto integrated species identification, wouldn't that be awesome.........http://www.apple.com...ion/richardson/

According to some folks at macrumors.com who have been to the Apple Store and asked, physical copies of Aperture will not be on the shelves until tomorrow. It looks like I'll need to endure a 500+ Meg download tonight. Remember the days when DSL seemed fast enough?

I pick up an upgrade copy of Aperture 3 at the Apple Store last night.
Installation was a greater chore than I anticipated. Aperture crashed consistently on startup. A little googling revealed that this problem is widespread amongst upgraders. The solution was to delete the Aperture ProID file from Library/Application Support. After restart I needed to enter the serial of my previous Aperture install (Aperture v2).
After start-up, Aperture 3 took 2+ hours to update 70,000 thumbnails in my referenced photo library.
Once I had Aperture 3 up and running I had one additional crash that took down the whole computer, requiring a reboot. Fortunately I did not loose any work. In fact Aperture opened up to the same window with the same images selected prior to the crash
So far I’m happy with the features. I geotagged an entire Bali/Wakatobi trip very quickly. I just hope we see a stability update soon.
I'm learning not to be such an early adopter. I waited until this week to update the OS from 10.5.8 to 10.6.2. I was too anxious to wait for Aperture 3.1.